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OLPC and the "Innovator's Opportunity"
viralMeme sends in a piece from OLPC News featuring a video interview with Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepson. The interview goes over some of the improvements in the company's extremely power-efficient screen technology that will show up in the next generations of the OLPC. The article links a video side-by-side comparison among Pixel Qi, Kindle, and Toshiba R600 displays in sunlight and in shade; Pixel Qi is arguably more readable than Kindle, and in full color. Jepson refers to Clayton Christenson's 1997 classic The Innovator's Dilemma, explaining a seeming paradox in high-tech: why companies that listen to their customers aren't the ones that innovate. According to the article it's mainly because "the next big market isn't with your current customers. It's with a vastly larger group of would-be users who couldn't afford your previous products, or couldn't carry around the huge devices of previous generations." Jepson says, "The cool thing about the Pixel Qi technology is, you know, poor kids in Africa got it first... It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma."
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
You listen to your customers because they mostly can't articulate what they want. But you do have to understand their needs.
The OLPC is a stupid idea, because it's based on the assumption that the needs of poor kids in Africa are unique.
The first company that realizes the obvious, and sticks a power efficient screen in an ergonomic form factor, ignores all Microsoft attacks and bribes to make it run 7, and makes it almost disposable cheap... ...will have a product that the whole world will stampede to buy.
anymore? In the classic Innovator's Opportunity, netbooks have pretty much rendered this thing completely useless. They do pretty much the same thing(are actually better in some areas), for about the same price, sans all the smugness.
Here the laptops were finished to deploy in all public (and a few private) schools of the country last month afaik. Not sure in how much other countries was so widely deployed. But for having "the perfect" ebook device with most school children it still don't look like is being taking advantage of that fact around here, or at least is a bit too slow yet, and i mean both from the public/education sector as from the private one.
One of these screens with a low-power ARM CPU motherboard would be a really sweet geek laptop. It seems like that could hit a price that would be attractive to a lot of people while performing well enough to actually be useful. But all we're hearing from Pixel Qi at the moment is silence, and I'm betting the first laptop to come with this screen, if one ever does, will have an Atom CPU and run Windows. I wonder if Pixel Qi would be willing to sell these in hobbyist quantities... :'}
According to the interview, Pixel Qi are still supporting OLPC, but they aren't designing just for -- or even primarily for OLPC any longer. It is neat that kids in Africa were the first market for the new display technology, but we're going to see the newer Pixel Qi stuff in commercial netbooks long before the XO-2 is out, most likely.
The newest stuff does full color in direct sun, and apparently the generation after this will cut power consumption by a bunch.
You have a point, but I'm not sure if the original (laudable, perhaps naive or misplaced) aims of the original OLPC project were just about the hardware. /., let's use a car analogy; Electric cars, (100% ones, not hybrids), will require significant changes to infrastructure. For that matter, so will fuel-cell ones.
Since it's
That part of the OLPC project somehow got lost in the 'wow - we're gonna make a better mini-PC and OS' debate...
In order to get adoption of Win7 they're including an "XP Mode". Sometimes your existing customers don't want innovation because what you made before is "good enough".
That's fine. But the Innovator's Dilemma is a wholly unrelated to that form of customers not knowing what they want. Here is an excellent introduction to the Innovator's Delemma. The article talks about the rapid changes in the hard drive industry over.
This article isn't about customers not knowing what they want. It's about how over time, who your customers are can radically change as brand new markets emerge. For example, hard disk business with mainframes was all about cost per megabyte. But in the new desktop computer market, the criteria by which things are judged is totally different than just cost per megabyte. Overall cost for the unit is more important, and physical size. A mainframe customer wouldn't be interested in a drive that costs more per megabyte but is smaller and has an overall lower price per unit-- but a desktop customer would be interested. The topic of the article is that if you exclusively listen to your customers without contemplating how the world is changing, you can sink yourself. Same situation with the newspaper industry: over-focus on existing markets and existing business lines can cause you to not see the opportunity in emerging markets, as the Rocky Mountain News learned.
Please, please look at http://perniciousolpc.wordpress.com/ and comment.
I've read lots of vague new stories about this over the past few months and seen lots of videos but I'd like them to just release some proper technical specs without having to parse a collection of transcribed press releases and watch dull 10 minute videos.
how much exactly does a screen cost at each size?
Resolution at each size or DPI?
response time?
Power usage in W?
I'm not interested in your philosophy. When can I buy your product without jumping through OLPC's hoops?
"XP mode" just lets you run older programs for which the developers haven't cranked out a Windows 7 patch/version yet. It's not like you can just dual-boot XP and ignore you have 7 or something.
Speaking of smugness ... *ahem* I find this fascinating, especially the part about making LCD screens easier for reading and watching video while increasing battery life. When she mentions that the increases to battery life will start coming next year it makes me wonder if Apple is working with Pixel Qi on their rumored Mac Tablet.
These videos are excellent examples of why the internet shouldn't move to be video based.
I don't mind having an additional video, but for the love of all that is decent, create a decent article around the video's contents first that we can all read quickly, without the "sorry, my home lab is a bit crap" filler that wastes time.
Point is they're doing it different than Vista for a reason.
Enjoy your spam.
The funny thing is that this is on topic because the Innovator's Dilemma is strongly based around people thinking that things are good enough and an innovator cutting back in the overshooting areas and instead focusing efforts on either the price or other areas (or even both). The netbooks are an example of where laptops were overshooting the customer and the smaller machines brought benefits through their size, the incumbent companies brushed it off as weak crap but the customers didn't really need more than that. Meanwhile the netbooks are growing in capability and eating into the full sized laptop market.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
People believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt rather than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technologies
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When Gary left Digital Research with Tom, they were mastering the first encyclopedia on a CD. They were using a VAX to create the CD image, and it took two washing machine sized hard drives to model the target CDROM. Things have come a long way since then.
Instead OLPC twiddled its thumbs and Asus, Acer and others stole the market from right under them. I still think OLPC could salvage something by doing a commercial variant. After all, it still has some advantages over the competition, not least of which its designed for kids. Lots of parents would buy an OLPC for their kid if they could walk into Toys R Us and buy one off the shelf.
You forgot to tag the article as "old news".
We have seen all those videos long time ago.
Is an olpc really easier to read a book on than a kindle screen?
Yeah I disagree with the article's assertion you shouldn't listen to your customers. You should listen to your customers, but do so understanding most requests aren't for what they're asking for, it's for a more fundamental desire. And it's up to the innovator to determine what that is.
"I want a faster horse." "So you want to be able to travel further faster?" "Yes." "Ok how about a cart that travels as fast as a horse and go several hundred miles without stopping to rest, would that satisfy your desires?"
"I want a brighter backlight."
"Why do you think you need a brighter backlight?"
"Because I can't see the screen in direct sun."
"Ok would a screen which reflects light and is readable in all lighting conditions satisfy that need?"
It's always helpful to deconstruct your customer's or client's feedback into outcomes or objectives instead of technical specifications. And if they ask for something specific it's usually a good idea to define whether they really want that in specific thing or there is some specific attribute of that thing that think is unique to it.
You did not comment on the suggestion to use the "deconstruct function" to dump Microsoft support and personal ID spy ware tags to emerge the better, more secure platform" from the "tag along market" [TAM] into the larger "all consumer market" [ACM] space.
The consumers in the ACM space are all new customers, want, can afford, can use, need the functionality of the "better platform", and expect secure platform interaction with both the news and entertainment space and the person to person communications space.
The elements of that platform need to be functionally equivalent to, but independent of, a name branded Operating System support. Additionally it must be disposable, secure from personal id, and auto self emergent into the "installed based" space.
Please read http://perniciousolpc.wordpress.com/ and comment.
The world is stampeding to by the BSD based iPhone though. They like the shiny interface. The difference is marketing.
I doubt that a bare 1% of the iPhone market knows or cares about the *nix roots of the OS.
But you are quite right to say that they care about the iPhone's UI. That is where they spend their time.
They also care about the iPhone app.
That it comes with the Apple stamp of approval. That is clearly and attractively presented to the iPhone shopper.
This is where branding and marketing can reap huge benefits.
FOSS began as a development model.
To many it has become an ideological, religious, or political commitment.
The door that slams on the Seventh Day Adventist is often open to the Fuller Brush salesman.
Too often what FOSS is not is a market-oriented product that can stand on its own as best-of-breed.
That is where the geek's contempt for the "shiny interface" comes into play.
I was recently looking into LCD sub-pixel layouts, and found that there are more than just RGB columns. For one, there's the same arrangement, but with every other row shifted horizontally by 1.5 sub-pixels. This improves things because the spacing between like-colored sub-pixels is similar, no matter what direction; with columns, vertically they are right next to each other, while horizontally they're 3 sub-pixels apart. Others put twice as many greens. There's even RGBW, that adds white into the mix, to increase brightness and efficiency.
But the problem with all the alternate geometries is that you don't have pixels in a normal grid, so it seems that most computers will always be stuck with the sub-optimal grid arrangement. But for custom devices where there isn't lots of legacy software, they can use new arrangements. Things like cell phones and portable games fall into this category. It's very similar to the processor architecture issue, where personal computers are mostly stuck with x86, while others can use things like ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.
Maybe this isn't exactly the "inventor's dilemma", but it reminded me of it.
I absolutely agree. It is possible to find laptops that can be taken outside, say Panasonic's Toughbooks - not at all cheap. The market is a niche because it is aimed at people like the military or the largest construction companies. Unfortunately, they are a tad expensive to be used for many other outdoor persuits like field research.
A commercial OLPC for adults that was aimed at the low-end of the Toughbook territory, in other words, a hardened netbook would have been extremely successful for all kinds of low-end commercial stuff like data logging etc or even more general outdoor use.
As for kids, why not just a partnership eith Fischer Price or something?
See my journal, I write things there
I'm hoping the screen has improved enough to eliminate those annoying dead pixels.
I avoided my new G1G1 XOPC after the novelty wore off because of the dead pixels in full-color mode. They don't appear in reflective mode.
Why don't we pass a law that all laptops should have reflective mode?
Kriston
That's an interesting take, it's like the scaling-back of capability (resulting in benefits of lower cost, longer battery life, and "good enough" functionality) *is* the innovation. That may be true of a Dell mini (aside from any extra effort to make things smaller), but for the OLPC there was certainly other innovation on top of that (the display, mesh, UI, security model, etc.).
Yes, there's always another innovation involved. Whether it's a new business model or a new technology, it's usually something that further reduces the cost or massively increases the product's appeal (think Wii motion controls). A crucial part is that the innovation must look harmless to the incumbent by performing pretty badly compared to existing products by the old metrics and going where the incumbent doesn't WANT to go (telephone vs telegraph, the telephone was seen as inferior and unfit for the telegraph's customers at first).
Then the incumbent will not fight and instead cede markets that are contested until the challenger takes up a dangerous amount of marketshare. Then the incumbent usually counterattacks by attempting to co-opt the invention. If the asymmetry of motivation is properly in place the incumbent will not be willing to really deliver what he perceives as an inferior device and we see cramming: The incumbent attempts to build the innovation into his existing product (perfect example: Sony Sixaxis controller, motion controls crammed into a controller shape that did not compromise its old functionality one bit while the Wiimote was designed to be easier to wield in one hand) instead of designing something new and entirely fit for the challenger's market. The incumbent's steps make the most business sense from his perspective but the inevitable result is that he is marginalized while the challenger eats more and more of the incumbent's market.
It fails if the asymmetry of motivation doesn't exist, if the incumbent has no reason to avoid the primary values that the challenger is pushing, a suspected example here is the Flip vs the iPod, Apple sees the value in a really simple camcorder and thus will not fail to offer the key values that the Flip's customers are looking for.
The funny thing is that the incumbent will be perceived to be too big to fail and when a recession comes along that tends to break the shaky financial situation of disrupted incumbents they often end up bankrupt.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I have a feeling this template gets more complicated when the innovation involves cross-domain (for lack of better word) involvement - like the way the iPhone depends on both Apple's hardware/software platform AND AT&T's network. I'm not thinking yet of a specific scenario that fits this innovation-incumbent-assymetry, but I know the iPhone seems to *want* to innovate past what AT&T perceives as good for itself.
A not well thought out idea in that direction: technologically, it's ridiculous that text (SMS) messages cost separately when an all-you-can eat data plan is already in place. The iPhone could certainly use data to gateway those messages at no cost to the user (at least in-network) and no strain (maybe *less* strain) on AT&T's network. But AT&T sees gold in the old pay-per-text paradigm from before data was available.
It would take heavy leverage on Apple's part to get AT&T to allow the iPhone to gate SMS over data at no charge to the user. Yet the user can Skype IM for free. Something is "wrong" there.
Other big "cross-domain" complications come from government involvement. The EU's idea of antitrust V. Microsoft e.g., or net neutrality (which could be looked at as trying to un-complicate a scenario like the iPhone+AT&T one).
And then you have the recent example of Saturn's demise, where their innovation was to be like the parent company's real external threat, Japanese manufacturers. So it was hampered from within. (GM is^H^H was big enough to have conflicts under the same roof, with the incumbent portion undercutting their own effort to address an innovative threat.)
Food for thought...
Well, Microsoft fucked up with Vista. To their credit Microsoft looked at the reasons Vista wasn't being adopted and decided to fix them. I guess that means they added in XP mode (but only for business versions) for compatibility with older software, they should have done this in Vista but didn't. XP mode just lets customers who want to upgrade but have apps that only run on XP to upgrade. I don't think it's going to do much to get people who are happy with XP to upgrade.
So, I presume this new LCD won't give me a headache after 12 hours looking at it?
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
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